The noise from the pub cuts off abruptly as the door swings shut. She hesitates, not knowing where he has parked his car, and he gestures up the road towards the square. His other hand lifts towards, although does not quite touch, the small of her back.
‘It’s just up here. Can you manage in those?’ He nods towards her shoes, his face dubious in the way of all men who have trouble with the physics of it.
‘Please.’ She scoffs, but lightly, and delights in the way he rolls his eyes.
It is not the done thing, she supposes, for him to bow out of his own leaving drinks so early; but he had pled packing, and last-minute purchases to be made, and the cleaning of his house, which she has always imagined to be scrupulously tidy in a rather spartan way. Eventually he was allowed to leave in a final flurry of handshakes and embraces. Her own quiet gathering of handbag and coat went relatively unnoticed—she would be back in the office, after all, on Monday—and she was ready beside the door as he turned towards it, his eyebrows raised.
‘You’re off too?’
‘I think so. Any chance of a lift?’
They wait at the lights. The way he presses the button on the pedestrian crossing is slow and deliberate. She shivers. If he was her husband, he would put an arm around her, rub briskly up and down her back to warm her up. But he is not her husband.
‘Here we go.’
They cross between the idling cars, the air heavy with fumes. On the other side of the road are the gardens, impenetrably dark and dense with autumn drift. Although it is late now, there is not a single space in the row of cars parked at an angle to the railings.
‘I’m just down here.’ He raises one arm and points into the distance.
‘You were lucky to get a spot.’
‘I had to circle twice.’
It is a Friday night, and town is heaving. Though it is early enough, the younger people are just getting going, really, their staggering progress down the footpaths the result of excited anticipation rather than drink. There is a sudden buzz of conversation as each knot of people passes them: a braying laugh, a muttered snatch of Dutch or perhaps German, a roar now of ‘Fuck’s sake, Jessica!’ Their own progress is more sedate. At one point she stumbles (can she really have reached a stage of life where she can’t navigate a five-minute walk in proper heels?) and grabs only briefly at his arm, barely there beneath the thickness of his coat.
‘Sorry.’
He says nothing. He presses something on his keys, and the lights of a car flicker on and off. She has been in his car before. It has a powerful engine, she remembers, and is always very clean.
‘Go ahead there.’
He opens the door for her, and waits until she is settled in the passenger seat to close it. She thinks it is like how someone would close the door for an elderly person, a friend of their mother’s they have offered to see safely home. But no, with him it would just be his way. He always drives to work and to these after-work things; he has never been a drinker, in all the years she has known him. She doesn’t know if there is a backstory to this. In any case, it is a cold night, and she is glad of the lift. As he walks around to his own door she glances at her phone in case she has missed a text from Graham, but there is nothing, and she lets it slide back into her bag.
He settles himself into the driver’s seat. ‘You’re on Killawn Avenue, isn’t that right?’
‘Yes, just beyond the church.’
He has driven her home before, two or three times. Three times, then, okay; she remembers each of them well. The best was that day of the heavy rain, when all of Dublin had been one giant snarl of traffic and they sat for long minutes at every junction. The wipers beating relentlessly back and forth, the windows damp and foggy, cocooning them from the rest of the world. He kept apologising for the time it all was taking, and she just smiled and reassured him and thought Oh, I do not mind.
Once they are out of the city centre the streets are quiet. The fan has heated up now, and there is a pleasantly warm fug in the car. She thinks they might drive forever.
‘When do you leave?’
‘Thursday. I’ll have the weekend to settle in, then the job starts on the Monday.’
‘You’ve found somewhere to live?’
‘Just for now. A flat. A serviced flat, actually, if you can believe they still exist. I’ve taken it for a month, just. Till I find somewhere.’
There is something almost vulgar about serviced. She tries to picture the flat: its bachelor neatness, its quiet.
‘I’ve never been to Manchester.’
‘Nor had I, until the interview. It seems all right.’
She watches his hand on the gear stick, marvelling at its closeness. How to touch it now would be something irrevocable.
‘You’ll be missed.’
He shrugs, a gentle movement despite his big shoulders. ‘Twelve years. It was time to move on.’
She has been there nearly eight years herself, although it feels both more and less than that. She remembers her first day, being led around the office by Bob, the department head—Bob, who was so kind in an old-fashioned, avuncular sort of way, and who, six months after she started, had dropped dead in the lobby one bright summer morning—led around, anyway, by poor dead Bob and introduced to everyone and immediately despairing of ever being able to remember the names. And then in the little kitchen opposite the meeting room Bob had introduced him, referring to him as ‘Our man in Havana’ for some reason she cannot now remember, and he had shifted the pile of folders he was carrying to his left hand so he could shake hers with his right. She had noticed, even in her fluster, the absence of a ring on that left hand; unusual for his age, although maybe it was only the newness of the weight on her own finger that made her pay attention.
‘What about you? Will you stay there forever, do you think?’
‘Oh god, I don’t know. For the moment, anyway. I don’t think I could cope with the hassle of looking for something else.’
The lights turn orange as they approach, and she prays silently that he is not the sort of driver who will speed up as they change to red. But she knows he will not be. There is a soft wheeze from the car as he presses on the brake.
‘Are you warm enough?’
‘Yes, it’s lovely.’ She is about to mention how Graham never likes the heat on in the car, but she stops herself. She is wary of disloyalty.
She thinks suddenly of the night years ago when they all stayed late to get a project over the line, an eleventh-hour change of direction from a client who was too big to be told where to go. Gradually the others packed up and went home until, with the clock pushing towards midnight, it was just themselves and Jason, Bob’s underwhelming replacement, with his combover and his single entendres. And how when Jason finally left they looked at each other and let out a sort of gust of shared relief. She remembers how he pushed his chair back from the table with his feet and stretched hugely and told her he was going out to get dinner for them both. She sat there in the eerie quiet of the after-hours building and waited to hear the ping of the lift and his footsteps coming back up the corridor, and she thought I have never been so happy. And even the terrifying implications of this could not spoil her joy.
That was before kids, of course. Now she is out the door at five to get to the crèche in time for collection and the fractious journey home and the tedium of trying to cook something for dinner that everyone would eat. But not tonight: tonight Graham will have picked them up and made the fishfingers and argued over a bath that was rarely really necessary but helped put some sort of shape on the day. And now she was out in the world at night, an event now so rare that she had agonised for longer than was truly sensible about what to wear, and whether to run up to Grafton Street for a blow-dry at lunch. She had not done this in the end: the girls at reception had organised a cake, and the MD came down to say a few words, and it would have been wrong to miss it.
She wonders if he is aware, as she always is, of where the other is in the room at any given time.
She counts now; there are four more sets of traffic lights between here and the house.
‘Will you miss Dublin?’
He smiles, although his eyes stay on the road. ‘Of course I will.’
‘What will you miss?’ Is she fishing now? Not really. But she is more than a little drunk.
‘All sorts. Decent butter. The seafront at Clontarf, on a sunny day.’
She knows what she will miss; she has listed the things to herself, in the small quiet hours of her sleepless nights, ever since that day in the break room at work when he had told her. His face serious, hers smiling far too widely in a rictus of feigned delight. How wonderful for you!
A new thought strikes her. ‘What are you doing with your own place?’
‘I’ve rented it out. For now, anyway.’ He turns to her slightly, shrugs. ‘Just till I get settled, I suppose. Make sure I haven’t made a huge mistake.’
Another set of lights, callously green this time. She has always hated the colour. She turns her face back to the window.
‘I’m sure you haven’t.’
Streets, finally, that are too familiar.
‘Direct me, now.’
‘It’s left here. After the shops.’ Although she thinks, perhaps, he knows this already. There is silence as he makes the turn.
‘And then straight through the roundabout.’ It is a bit like being in a taxi, back when she used to get taxis. Right at the lights. Anywhere here is fine. No, no, you keep that. Her road is quiet; it is a road of families, and traffic-calming humps, and occasional mild disputes about the ownership of wheelie bins.
The car slows. ‘This one.’ It is not quite a question.
‘Yes. With the big tree.’ Her children love that tree. There are constant requests for a treehouse to be built in it, a rope swing hung. But neither she nor Graham would have the first idea of how to go about it.
He turns off the car engine, and it is suddenly very quiet. He speaks then, and if there is a touch of desperation in his voice, it is very much under control.
‘I hope you don’t mind my saying. You’re very attractive.’
‘I don’t mind you saying.’
He stares straight ahead, through the windscreen and the night beyond. ‘I sometimes think. If we had met ten years ago.’
‘Very possibly.’ She says it not coquettishly, but with sadness.
The front door opens, and her husband stands there in the soft light of the hallway. He lifts a hand in his mild wave, and they both wave back.
She turns to him. Her fingers have already found the handle of the door.
‘Well. Good luck with all of it. I really hope it works out for you.’
‘Thank you.’
‘You’ll keep in touch?’
There is a pause, and then he says her name, just once. His voice is not like she has ever heard it before.
She leans in and kisses the dryness of his cheek. It is no different to any other time she has greeted him, or said goodnight: even the keenest observer could not possibly accuse her of anything. The clutch of her fingers at the collar of his coat happens, surely, only in her imagination. Then she is out of the car and standing on the cold pavement, which the light from her front door does not reach. She lifts her hand, just once, and turns towards the house.
High heels on the gravel. Graham calling to her in greeting. The leaden thump of her own heart.
It is not that this is not hard—oh believe her, it is hard. But she doesn’t turn until she has heard the car pull away from the kerb, and then it is only to shut the door.
